Kingfisher: Interview with Rozie Kelly

Hi Rozie, congratulations on the publication of your debut! This was a really special one to read after watching you win the NorthBound Book Award and the announcement of your book deal with Saraband back in April 2024. What has the last year been like? And how are you feeling now that your book is about to be out in the world?

Thank you so much! It’s been such a lovely experience – the opportunity to work with my very talented editor in particular has been a highlight – the whole process felt like it elevated my writing in a way I’ve not experienced before so I feel very lucky. In many ways the past year has felt quite normal, until very recently I’m not sure I truly believed this was happening. But in the past couple of months I’ve had people engaging with my work as readers for the first time and that has been magical. Knowing that people have found something in Kingfisher that resonated with them is really all I’ve ever dreamed of having as a writer.

One of the most striking characters in the novel is the narrator’s mother Hetty – a deeply homophobic and splenetic figure – who we first meet living in an expensive care facility. Her character brought to mind Louise Bourgeois’s Spider and Livia Soprano so she clearly made an impression on me! Can you tell us more about the impact of Hetty’s cruelty on the narrator?

I always feel slightly guilty for writing such nasty mother characters (this isn’t the first time!) as my own mum is a saint, but I think it’s a fascinating way to unpick a character’s psychology – by disturbing a balance of care that should be unconditional. I think cruelty is almost always coming from a place of pain. Hetty’s own pain and her inability to deal with it leads her to inadvertently teach the protagonist to be removed from his own emotions, something which I don’t think comes naturally to him. There is a constant push and pull, between his selfishness and coldness and the love he actually wants to give the world around him. Although the love he has for the poet can be questioned in many ways, I think one of the things that happens over the course of the novel is he learns how to love unconditionally, and therefore removes himself from Hetty’s influence.

I read in an interview that Kingfisher was partly inspired by your interest in exploring the power dynamics of a relationship between a younger man and an older woman. Through your novel’s male narrative perspective, you really capture the vulnerability of being a woman, whether young or old – I’m thinking particularly of a scene where the narrator has a casual sexual encounter with his English students. Was displaying this vulnerability and power dynamic through a male lens a deliberate narrative choice?

I’m really glad you picked this scene to ask me about those dynamics, as this scene in particular was one where I tried to highlight the vulnerabilities of all the characters involved. I was interested in that, in the beginning, but also I approached writing his character exactly as I’d approach writing a woman. The male lens was deliberate, but I’m not sure it made as much difference to the emotions as I’d expected. He was searching for connection and he found it in those girls, and they gave it willingly. In many ways nobody is in any real danger of anything but hurt feelings, but the thing that interested me about this scene was the fact that the protagonist recognised the ways in which he was taking advantage of them, and yet chose to do it anyway. Not only did he choose to do it but he also tortured himself about it afterwards, when in all likelihood the girls were fine. I chose a male lens because I was interested in male power, but what I found when I looked through it was weakness.

Reading the endorsements on the back cover, the beauty of the language has rightly been singled out by the critics. Indeed, the line: ‘She smelled like jasmine. No, not exactly. She smelled like the earth beneath a jasmine plant on a hot day,’ reads like a modern day Keatsian ode. In writing prose about the lives and loves of poets, how much were beauty and aesthetics an intentional consideration? Or did that happen naturally in the writing process?

I’m naturally drawn towards poetic prose, although I also love a really clean sentence – some examples of my influences there are Deborah Levy, Sophie Mackintosh and K Patrick, two of which are also poets. So I think in part that’s something that I lean towards naturally, but also I find poets fascinating. I don’t have a poet’s mind at all, but I am lucky enough to be friends with quite a few of them and I am always in awe of the very particular attention they give the world. So I suppose that was something I was mirroring a little, in the way he thinks about sensory experiences, the importance of smells and tastes and touch. So it’s a mixture of being drawn to that language, being a very tactile person, and perhaps a little bit of envy of a truly poetic eye.

I wanted to ask you about the novel’s almost gothic ending which – without giving away any spoilers – poses interesting questions about authorial control and power. Did you know from the beginning you would arrive at this point of ethical ambiguity and semi-gothic horror?

I don’t plan my writing at all, so at no point during the first draft did I have any idea what would happen. This is one of my favourite parts of the writing process because it feels most similar to reading, I am learning the story as I go along. But I also tend to write about quite dark subjects and I feel that the use of something slightly surreal can make it easier to look directly at something very difficult – similar perhaps to the way some people use humour. And in case it isn’t obvious, I’m a bit obsessed with control and power – I find it fascinating, so experimenting with that within the story as well as how the story is told/how much an of it can be believed was irresistible to me. I’m also a little gothic teenager still underneath it all, so arguably that is part of it!

And finally, I can’t not ask, how are you celebrating the publication of this stunning debut and what do you have planned next?

To celebrate I am getting everyone I love in the same room, making them dress fancy and having some drinks and hopefully being extremely silly. And I’ve begun writing a new novel, this time not using the poetic eye but a more literal lens. So that’s very exciting and could go absolutely anywhere.

Purchase Kingfisher through our Bookshop affiliate link

Kingfisher is published on 3 April 2025 with Saraband, and we have three copies to give away!

For a chance to win, tell us what you’re reading on X (Twitter), Instagram or Facebook using the hashtags #Kingfisher and #NorthernBookshelf. Winners will be drawn on 11 April 2025.